Five Resources for Staying on Top of Web Capabilities
Five resources that tell you what a browser API does, which browsers support it, and whether it is safe to use in production today.
Between MDN, caniuse, web.dev, the WebKit blog, chromestatus, and Baseline, there is no shortage of places to look. The challenge is knowing which one answers which question.
MDN Web Docs
The name says Mozilla, but MDN today is a nonprofit effort aimed at being the official documentation for the entire web platform -- not just Firefox. They document APIs across all browsers, write usage guides, and maintain compatibility tables. If you want to understand what an API does and how to use it, MDN is the first stop.
Worth knowing: the W3C spec for any API is written to explain how browsers should implement it, not how developers should use it. Reading a spec as a web developer is genuinely hard going. MDN translates that into code examples and plain explanations.
caniuse.com
The fastest way to get a browser support matrix. Search for an API or CSS property and you get a grid of browsers and versions, color-coded by support status. It shows you the exact version where support landed, any known caveats, and the global usage percentage for each browser. Useful at a glance when you need to make a quick "can I ship this?" call.
web.dev
Published by the Google Chrome team, but the content is not Chrome advertising. External contributors publish there, and the editorial bar is that articles should be useful for the web as a whole. For capabilities specifically, web.dev has thorough guides with real code examples, use-case explanations, and demos. It also has a free PWA e-book that includes a full chapter on web capabilities.
WebKit Blog
The closest thing to official Safari documentation. Apple does not have a dedicated web developer docs site the way Google does, so the WebKit blog is where new Safari features get announced and explained. The quality has improved significantly in recent years -- release notes are now detailed and timely. For anything Safari or iOS-specific, this is the primary source.
chromestatus.com
This one is less well known but genuinely useful. It tracks exactly which APIs landed in which version of Chrome -- stable, origin trial, or behind a flag. You can see the history of any capability: when it first shipped on Android, when it was added to Windows, when it became enabled by default. It also shows what is in the current beta and canary channels, which is useful for planning ahead. Filter by feature name to find detailed technical notes and sample links for almost every API Chrome has ever shipped.
Baseline
The newest addition to this toolkit. Baseline is a multi-vendor initiative -- Google, Mozilla, and Apple working together -- to define a single, clear list of capabilities that are stable and safe to use across all major browsers.
Think of it as the official label for "green API." If a capability is marked Baseline, it means it works in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge, with enough track record that you can use it in production without worrying about compatibility fallbacks.
The lists are versioned by year, starting with Baseline 2023. The idea is that by the end of each year, a new Baseline list gets published for the following year -- so Baseline 2025 arrived at the end of 2024. You are starting to see the Baseline badge appear on MDN and web.dev next to individual APIs, making it easy to spot which capabilities have crossed that threshold.
Quick Reference
| Resource | Best for |
|---|---|
| MDN | API usage docs, browser compat tables |
| caniuse.com | Quick browser support matrix |
| web.dev | Capability guides with code examples |
| WebKit blog | Safari and iOS-specific updates |
| chromestatus.com | Chrome version history per API |
| Baseline | Multi-vendor "safe to use" label per year |
Practice
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